


i haven't slept since my kids manifested.

by orphan_account



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Family, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Charles doesn't like to settle, Erik is a Father, F/M, M/M, Minor Raven/Azazel, Multi, dadneto
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:47:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You made a mess, didn’t you, Frosch! What am I going to do with you, and with one hand?” He tuts at her, and the blue woman laughs quite loudly, and Erik glances back curiously to find Charles leaning against his own shopping cart, his head in his hands, watching the interaction with a strange expression on his face, halfway between confused horror and amazed adoration. Charles waves at Lorna, and Lorna waves back, chubby fingers wiggling excitedly at the man giving her time of day. Erik raises an eyebrow at him, Charles looks away, and they both turn bright pink. Lorna just burbles on, oblivious.</p><p>(a definitely-lengthy and potentially-rambly account of a modern au in which erik is a dad trying his best and charles is a bachelor who isn't sure he wants to settle down at all)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i haven't slept since my kids manifested.

**Author's Note:**

> this chapter, and all those after, based on input both from myself and others, all of which are located in my [dadneto headcanons tag](http://bilehnsherr.tumblr.com/tagged/dadneto%20tag/chrono) on tumblr!

It always seems like weekends are the worst; this is how Erik feels, anyway, teeth clenching as he rises ( _back cracking he should see a chiropractor ha ha no way in hell he can afford to with braces looming in the wake of the twins’ joint sixteenth birthday_ ), pulling himself from bed and quietly tiptoeing into the bathroom. He checks his phone on the counter--five-thirty--and judges that he has about a half-hour until Lorna potentially rouses from her fitful sleep, fingertips curling and uncurling as she cries out for him, and another ten after that before Wanda’s alarm blares and Lorna _definitely_ wakes up.

He realizes a full two minutes of calculating has passed and looks at himself in the mirror instead of the time, phone clacking gently on his chipped marble countertop. He looks… _fuck,_ he looks tired. He always does. It has started to suit him, like a second skin, and he only gets through that much thought, scrubbing a wet cloth over weekend-stubble, before the baby begins wailing. Damn. Miscalculation.

He wouldn't mind, but as soon as he reaches the door, he feels Pietro’s door start to swing closed, and before he can really wake himself up enough to realize what that means, the door slams loudly shut. Lorna’s cries reach an all-time crescendo. Erik descends the stairs a bit more grumpy than he would normally, not even with enough time to start his coffee pot, before he descends upon Lorna, who, after catching sight of her father, settles for wiping at her bleary baby eyes with her chubby fists and sniffling.

He will have to talk to Pietro later, he decides, definitively choosing the low road after opening his door with a wave of his hand, peeking in while he bounces Lorna on his hip. Pietro looks miserably exhausted, and Erik feels bad for him instantly. “Just got to sleep?” Erik asks, and Pietro grimaces.

(His mutation had manifested recently, and while he had always been fast, there was the struggle with his sleeping and eating schedules to overcome. Erik often found himself sprawled out on the sofa in the middle of the day, too afraid to move because Pietro had finally stopped thinking and moving and eating and talking long enough to sleep.)

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Erik smiles at him. “I didn't mean to slam the door. But she was crying. I heard the water from your faucet.”

Instead of saying that it is alright, because it really goes without saying, Erik shifts the weight on his hip and runs his free hand through his hair. “Could you wake your sister? We need to go grocery shopping.” A wave of cool air passes and Pietro is gone. Erik will still need to get used to that.

Lorna says something incoherent, tiny fist stuffed in her drooling mouth, and Erik can't bring himself to pull it away. Instead, he makes his way into the kitchen, tucking Lorna into her highchair and busying himself with the coffeepot as he listens to Wanda throw every soft object at her brother from the other room. There's a short argument, a thump like Pietro has pulled Wanda off her bed and onto the floor, and then the shower in the bathroom the children share starts up. Pietro takes his seat beside Lorna’s highchair, offering Cheerios to her clumsy grip while Erik pours her something to drink in her sippy-cup, apple juice diluted with water, a trick he had learned whilst reading mommy blogs at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

_When had he accepted this word so casually? Sippy-cup. What absurdity. It was just a cup that babies had to struggle a little more with to avoid spilling their brightly colored juice everywhere._

“Why doesn't Lorna need her bottle anymore?” Pietro asks, watching Lorna try and tip out her juice as Erik passes the bottle to her. “She doesn't have teeth. Are you scared you'll give her teeth like me and Wanda?”

Erik snorts, tipping cream into his coffee, stirring it with a twirl of his finger while he turns to his son. “Your teeth have nothing to do with whether you were bottlefed or not. I had teeth like yours before I had braces, Pete. Lorna just spills her bottle every time she uses it, and she's old enough to be able to use a…” he trails off. That word again!

“A sippy cup?”

“That.” Erik gratefully takes a sip of his coffee then, reaching over to ruffle a hand in Pietro’s silver hair. It's soft, unruly as his was, and Erik can't help but think _thank God he's not a ginger_.

While Pietro and Wanda are twins, Erik can't help but notice just how different they are sometimes. They have Erik’s nose, yes, his intense eyes, the strength to his jaw already in their chubby teen faces, but they are as fraternal as they could be. Pietro is freckled, pale, and had he not been born with the shock of silver hair he had, he’d probably have the same dark red mop his sister has, but genetics settled for just the texture to match. Wanda, though, is more tanned like Erik, and she has her mother’s autumn gold eyes where Pietro’s eyes are his own, pale blue and almost a milky grey.

Erik downs half his coffee while Pietro talks about school, something or other art class he hates, blah blah chatter about how easy gym is, and the two of them both jump a little when Wanda slumps into her chair, hair still wrapped in a towel.

“Sleeping beauty decides to grace the world with her presence,” Erik muses, and Wanda self-consciously tucks a freed curl into the towel. “Don't suppose you had a good night's rest whilst on the line with Kitty all night?”

Wanda opens her mouth, and Pietro grins, guilty for her. She shuts it. No point in lying to Erik, he knows when her cell phone’s buttons are being pressed and knows the feeling of it moving to her bed from her nightstand by heart. “I’m not in trouble?” she finally asks.

“It's Saturday. You can stay up as reasonably late as you don't get caught while in the act, I think.” Erik should probably _not_ say this, should talk about how her sleep schedule is imperative to health, but he cites the bags under his eyes, the pudge to his stomach, and throws caution to the wind with regards to healthy living. Besides, he’s hashed this fight out a million times with her, and he doesn't like to encourage Pietro’s stealing further by taking her cell phone.

“Why am I up, then,” she doesn't quite ask so much as moan, Lorna tossing Cheerios into her toweled hair with fervor. “I need my beauty rest, Vati. Don't do this to me.”

“Yes, and _I_ need shopping buddies, or I’ll come home with turkey bacon and canned matzoh soup, because I am, apparently--”

Pietro cuts him off. “A mess of an adult who tries to pretend he's a practicing Jew to avoid justifying buying meat products alone?”

Wanda butts in, too. “Someone still under the assumption we like hummus?”

Lorna even gets her word in. “Ababa, bati?”

“I seem to recall a time when I couldn't get out of the store without buying hummus,” Erik sniffs, indignant and only half-joking. “Pete snuck it under the candy bars.” He scoops Lorna up and holds her accusingly. “At least she still loves me.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

A few hours later they manage to rouse themselves (Wanda) enough to get into the car in one piece, though Wanda has begun to doze off in the front seat and Pietro is rubbing his jaw from where he accidentally slammed into the glass door, his other hand occupied in both of Lorna’s. She flails in her carseat excitedly, because she _loves_ the store.

The grocery store they shop in isn't a multi-billion dollar chain, but it certainly isn't a whole-grain hippie ripoff, either. Erik is nothing if not appropriately thrifty (and who wasn't with three kids), so he likes to shop in the middle ground of expensive-but-disgusting and cheap-but-disgusting, which Erik calls "edible". After nearly having to hoist Wanda over his shoulder to wake her up, they manage to meander inside without much issue, though Lorna is still trying to squirm around in the shopping cart he has placed her in; even with the juvinile seatbelt unfastened after a tantrum for which he recieves several apologetic looks, all from what he assumes are baseline women, she seems to want to kick Erik in the groin for nothing short of amusement. It certainly amuses Pietro enough, so in order not to give the two the satisfaction, he pushes her ahead slightly, distracting her with a few coins floating just out of her teething grasp.

Pietro, of course, is allowed free reign of the store, because Erik doesn't mind as long as he can still feel the magnets sewn into his clothes--call him paranoid, but it works--and Wanda has no issue milling around just behind him, tapping away on her phone and occasionally asking him whether he forgot the pasta sauce on purpose. Pietro appears every so often to either deposit necessary items into the cart or to hold out his offering, mostly junk food he lives off of, to which Erik usually agrees.

He stares down at the makeshift list he has scrawled onto the back of a reciept with one hand, mentally checking off the list as his children meander aimlessly, and it comes as an unwelcome shock as he slams into a fleshy wall and drops the glass container of instant coffee grounds in his other grip, which smashes quite loudly. Wanda jumps, dropping her phone, and as Pietro reappears, he picks up Lorna and begins to shush her, because the sudden crash has startled her to tears. Erik feels like his body is throbbing, but quickly realizes it's actually his hand, which has a pretty decent-sized glass shard embedded in the palm. Wanda and Pietro pull matching _Vati, gross_ faces at him, but he mostly just stares at his hand, confused.

“Did I walk into you, or did you walk into me?” a voice says, as dazed as Erik feels.

The voice turns out to belong to a very, very, _very_ handsome man, who thankfully is not bleeding but seems to have fallen straight on his ass. Behind him is a beautiful blue woman who is holding an equally blue baby, and Erik would smile were his hand not fucking bleeding all over the aisle and were her face curled into something other than indignant disgust. Erik grazes over the man instead, half appreciative and half annoyed.

“It was my fault,” Erik says, already standing despite the glass still sticking out of his hand. Which the hot stranger does not even spare a glance at. “I wasn't watching where I was going.”

“Damn right it's your fault,” the woman says stiffly, her blue skin shifting slightly as she hands off her baby to a strikingly rigid-looking bright red man, who looks at Erik apologetically in turn. At least he is not going to have to have an argument in the middle of this grocery store with baselines, he thinks, brushing coffee grounds from his knees with his good hand. Any other situation, actually, and he would admire her mutation, ask her what is causing this disturbance in her skin, why she ripples like a shedding snake. “You could have seriously hurt him! What were you thinking, assaulting a guy in the middle of a shop?! Charles, are you alright?”

The stranger he has knocked over, Charles, looks up at him, a bit sheepish, and Erik feels quite stupid all of a sudden for not offering a hand to help him up sooner, so he does. “Raven, my darling,” Charles says, accepting the hand but not even _looking_ at Erik, which is more annoying than it should be, realistically. “It was an accident, honestly,” and he says it almost with a laugh, at which point Erik clenches his fist in annoyance, gasps in pain, and cradles his hurt hand. Only then does the pair in front of him notice it, both of them wearing matching expressions of shock and horror.

“Oh,” Charles says, his previously quite healthily-colored cheeks slowly draining. “You’re bleeding, oh dear, that looks quite bad.” He reaches a hand out nervously to touch it, which Erik almost pulls away from, but he also feels quite bad for assuming that Charles was just an asshole who hadn’t cared that he was bleeding, so he doesn’t. At least, that is what he will tell himself, decidedly _not_ enjoying how warm Charles’ hands are as they examine his wound with tentative touches. God, he’s depraved, he thinks, so far removed from people that he’s getting emotionally invested in someone who he just barrelled into whilst shopping for diapers and strawberry jam.

“I’m not sure that means you’re depraved,” Charles says with a laugh, and he pats Erik’s shoulder lightly. “I think that just means you’re a single father.”

“How do you know that--” Erik begins, raising his eyebrow tentatively, taking in just who is in front of him; business casual on a Saturday morning, suit jacket discarded and unseen, sleeves rolled up, sunglasses tucked neatly into his aloofly unbuttoned collar, a direct contrast to Erik’s very unflattering jeans and old university t-shirt, now stained with aged child vomit _and_ blood. A human? No, but he’s not baseline, surely, because he’s obviously a telepath. Erik is brash but refrains from calling himself depraved even at his worst. “Ah. Do you always read the minds of men that knock you down in the coffee aisle?”

Charles flushes, and removes his hand, and Erik absolutely does not mourn this loss. “No, I-- you were projecting rather loudly, I’ve been sort of listening to you the whole time without knowing it was you.” He moves his hands as he speaks, and Erik watches them instead of his smile, which snakes out of him and curls up the side of his mouth like a snake and takes his face hostage. Erik can’t help but fight a smile of his own, and he’s quite sure it isn’t Charles projecting his emotions.

“Um, pops, I think the L-bomb needs to be changed,” Pietro says suddenly, and _that_ snaps him out of his stupor as well as anything. He turns to the trio on his end of this exchange and notices that sure enough, Lorna is squirming (again) from her place tucked between the twins, and though he pointedly ignores the look that Wanda is giving him, he can’t ignore her while he takes Lorna from the pair of them, and she leans only an infinitely small amount closer and whispers “he’s so gay” under her breath. Erik’s ears turn pink, and he gives her a warning look.

Thankfully, he can turn his attention to Lorna, even with a pretty gross and fucked up hand, and he presses their noses together to try and coax the unhappy look off her face. “ _Für was ist dieses Gesicht?_ ” Erik coos at her, and she tries to wrap her mouth around the word _gesicht_ , which makes him smile, because she gets about as far as the first syllable before dissolving into her awkward potty dance again, a string of disgruntled mumbles following. “You made a mess, didn’t you, _Frosch!_ What am I going to do with you, and with one hand?” He tuts at her, and the blue woman laughs quite loudly, and Erik glances back curiously to find Charles leaning against his own shopping cart, his head in his hands, watching the interaction with a strange expression on his face, halfway between confused horror and amazed adoration. Charles waves at Lorna, and Lorna waves back, chubby fingers wiggling excitedly at the man giving her time of day. Erik raises an eyebrow at him, Charles looks away, and they both turn bright pink. Lorna just burbles on at him, oblivious.

Erik decides then, rather diplomatically, that it’s _probably_ a good idea to stop dripping all over the floor while this stranger watches him get flustered about his baby, and to also change his daughter's dirty diaper, so he deposits her back into the shopping cart and turns it towards the bathroom. Lorna waves all the way down the aisle, and the blue woman laughs loudly again, the sound following him all the way to the door of the bathroom.

"What was that all about?" Pietro asks as the door swings, not quite settled in its frame as Erik settles Lorna into the changing station.

"Pete, I think dad might be in love," Wanda replies, voice grave and theatrically hushed.

In response, Erik slams the bathroom door, sending the two into raucous laughter.

**Author's Note:**

> translations for the first chapter:
> 
> \- _vati_ \- father/dad  
>  \- _für was ist dieses gesicht?_ \- what's that face for?/what's with that face?  
>  \- _frosch_ \- frog


End file.
